Last season, the New York Giants were one of the NFL’s pleasant surprises. They won six of their first seven games, finished 9-7-1 and upset the Minnesota Vikings, who went 13-4 in the regular season, in the wild-card round of the playoffs.

It led to some hope that they could reach the postseason again this year. But so far, they have fallen to earth hard.

The Giants are 2-6, and they’re now running out of chances to turn things around and put themselves into the playoff chase. Their latest setback came on Sunday when they lost to the scrappy New York Jets, 13-10, in an ugly overtime contest.

The crux of their problems has come on the offensive side of the football, where they rank dead-last in points per game, yards per game and yards per play.

During the offseason, the Giants decided to give a big extension to quarterback Daniel Jones and place star running back Saquon Barkley on their franchise tag. It led Barkley to temporarily hold out, and now people are questioning the wisdom of extending Jones instead of Barkley.

Jones has thrown six interceptions and just two touchdown passes this year, and in five games, Barkley has run for 412 yards and a touchdown, although he’s at just 3.7 yards per carry.

Jones has missed the Giants’ last three games with a neck injury, although he has been cleared to return for this coming weekend’s game versus the Las Vegas Raiders.

Barkley impending free agency this offseason has cast another dark cloud over the team’s camp. He had 128 yards on the ground against the Jets, and he is the team’s only viable offensive threat. If anyone needed further proof of that, it came when the Giants had -9 passing yards (no, that is not a misprint) on 14 pass attempts on Sunday.

If Barkley leaves, they could be in for a long nuclear winter.

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